Pages

Saturday, January 29, 2011

The PCI 2011 Conference will run in parallel sessions, with invited talks, research and case study tracks. Authors are invited to submit papers in any area of Informatics, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Telecommunications, and Information Systems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

History. If we don’t know where we came from, it’s easy to get lost in where we’re going. Taking a look back at an early chromakey system known as Pantomation, we can’t help but draw the similarities between it and what we see today with Microsoft’s Kinect.

Until now, scientists have thought that the process of erasing information requires energy. But a new study shows that, theoretically, information can be erased without using any energy at all. Instead, the cost of erasure can be paid in terms of another conserved quantity, such as spin angular momentum.

In the study, physicistsJoan Vaccaro from Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, and Stephen Barnett from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK, have quantitatively described how information can be erased without any energy, and they also explain why the result is not as contentious as it first appears. Their paper is published in a recent issue of theProceedings of the Royal Society A.

Traditionally, the process of erasing information requires a cost that is calculated in terms of energy – more specifically, heat dissipation. In 1961, Rolf Landauer argued that there was a minimum amount of energy required to erase one bit of information, i.e. to put a bit in the logical zero state. The energy required is positively related to the temperature of the system’s thermal reservoir, and can be thought of as the system’s thermodynamic entropy. As such, this entropy is considered to be a fundamental cost of erasing a bit of information.

However, Vaccaro and Barnett have shown that an energy cost can be fully avoided by using a reservoir based on something other than energy, such as spin angular momentum. Subatomic particles have spin angular momentum, a quantity that, like energy, must be conserved. Basically, instead of heat being exchanged between a qubit and thermal reservoir, discrete quanta of angular momentum are exchanged between a qubit and spin reservoir. The scientists described how repeated logic operations between the qubit’s spin and a secondary spin in the zero state eventually result in both spins reaching the logical zero state. Most importantly, the scientists showed that the cost of erasing the qubit’s memory is given in terms of the quantity defining the logic states, which in this case is spin angular momentum and not energy.

The scientists explained that experimentally realizing this scheme would be very difficult. Nevertheless, their results show that physical laws do not forbid information erasure with a zero energy cost, which is contrary to previous studies. The researchers noted that, in practice, it will be especially difficult to ensure the system’s energy degeneracy (that different spin states of the qubit and reservoir have the exact same energy level). But even if imperfect conditions cause some energy loss, there is no fundamental reason to assume that the cost will be as large as that predicted by Landauer’s formula.

The possibility of erasing information without using energy has implications for a variety of areas. One example is the paradox of Maxwell’s demon, which appears to offer a way of violating the second law of thermodynamics. By opening and closing a door to separate hot and cold molecules, the demon supposedly extracts work from the reservoir, converting all heat into useful mechanical energy. Bennett’s resolution of the paradox in 1982 argues that the demon’s memory has to be erased to complete the cycle, and the cost of erasure is at least as much as the liberated energy. However, Vaccaro and Barnett’s results suggest that the demon’s memory can be erased at no energy cost by using a different kind of reservoir, where the cost would be in terms of spin angular momentum. In this scheme, the demon can extract all the energy from a heat reservoir as useful energy at a cost of another resource.As the scientists explained, this result doesn’t contradict historical statements of the second law of thermodynamics, which are exclusively within the context of heat and thermal reservoirs and do not allow for a broader class of reservoirs. Moreover, even though the example with Maxwell’s demon suggests that mechanical work can be extracted at zero energy cost, this extraction is associated with an increase in the information-theoretic entropy of the overall system.

“The maximization of entropy subject to a constraint need apply not only to heat reservoirs and the conservation of energy,” Vaccaro explained to PhysOrg.com.

The results could also apply to hypothetical Carnot heat engines, which operate at maximum efficiency. If these engines use angular momentum reservoirs instead of thermal reservoirs, they could generate angular momentum effort instead of mechanical work.

As for demonstrating the concept of erasing information at zero energy cost, the scientists said that it would take more research and time.

“We are currently looking at an idea to perform information erasure in atomic and optical systems, but it needs much more development to see if it would actually work in practice,” Vaccaro said.

She added that the result is of fundamental significance, and it’s not likely to have practical applications for memory devices.

“We don’t see this as having a direct impact in terms of practical applications, because the current energy cost of information erasure is nowhere near Landauer’s theoretical bound,” she said. “It’s more a case of what it says about fundamental concepts. For example, Landauer said that information is physical because it takes energy to erase it. We are saying that the reason it is physical has a broader context than that.”

Read more in Joan A. Vaccaro and Stephen M. Barnett. “Information erasure without an energy cost.” Proceedings of the Royal Society A. DOI:10.1098/rspa.2010.0577

Thursday, January 27, 2011

The Parallax Color Sorter uses the BASIC Stamp 2 microcontroller to locate, retrieve, and sort colored balls. This color sorter has the ability to identify five different colored ping-pong balls using the Parallax’s color sensor, the ColorPAL. Using a prototype robotic arm, the machine sorts the balls by color and also sorts according to the scenario set by the programmer.

The basic components of the color sorter are:

A robotic arm which features four servos: this arm has three degrees of freedom and distributes the balls to five different pots.

The “valve” set to each of the colors: this “valve” is assigned to recognize the color of each ball before the arm catches it.

The automatic “ball provider”: this “ball provider” mixes the balls and sends them down a tunnel with a double door that allows only one ball through at a time.

The electronic components of the color sorter are:

The Parallax Board of Education which contains the BS2 microcontroller programmed by PBasic language.

The Parallax serial LCD display that provides the user with useful information, such as: the color of the selected ball, the number, etc.

The color sensor, ColorPAL #28380, which recognizes the color of each ball.

The Parallax Servo Controller which drives the four servos of the robot arm and the fifth servo which controls the double door of “ball provider.”

A DC-motor board, which drives a DC motor, is located on the bottom of the “ball provider” and serves to mix the balls.

All of the cables that connect the hardware pass through the aluminum frame of the base. The construction details are shown in the 3D design of the project which was made by GoogleSketchUp 7 software.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

The goals of this program are to integrate students in their research sub-community and to give them a forum to talk to leading researchers in the field about their Ph.D. research. Students participating in the program will be provided scholarships to subsidize travel, conference registration, and housing expenses for ICML 2011. Note that both US and international students are eligible for this program.

A student does NOT need to have an accepted paper at the conference in order to participate in this program. In fact, one of scholarship programs explicit goals is to broaden student participation in the ICML research community. To help students be integrated into the conference, each sponsored students will have a poster on their research. Each paper presented during the daytime technical program will also be presented at a poster session. Students presenting papers at the conference will naturally present posters as part of the normal conference schedule. Students who do not have a paper at the main conference will have their posters integrated into the poster sessions. The poster format encourages the student participants to begin building a rapport with established researchers.

Dates

Applications due: April 26th

Decisions emailed to applicants: May 6th

Receipts due for reimbursement: August 20th

Application process

Students wishing to receive a conference travel scholarship are asked to send in an application with the following:

1. Fill out the cover sheet located here:

2. A one-page summary of their research

3. A curriculum vitae

4. A letter of recommendation from their thesis adviser, which states their student status and mentions the amount and type of funding available from the home institution. If the research is funded by an organization or agency, the letter should clearly indicate why those funds cannot be used to cover the costs of attending ICML.

Friday, January 21, 2011

We are excited to announce that the new 2011 PhD Challenge is now open for submissions. The goal of this year’s challenge is to get either the nickname “DIRTY OLD MAN” or“CRAZY CAT LADY” included in the byline for at least one author in the final version of a peer-reviewed academic paper. As an example, an eligible submission could contain the authors John “Dirty Old Man” Smith and/or Jane “Crazy Cat Lady” Smith. The task for this challenge is quite difficult, but we are confident that the world’s best and brightest minds are eager to overcome adversity.

The official Call for Participation contains all of the details of the contest, including the submission dates and the prizes to be awarded to the winner. The PhD Challenge is open to all current graduate students in four-year universities and institutions. Be sure to also read the eligibility rules to make sure that your submission follows the guidelines of the contest.

This is an excellent opportunity to attend a fully residential course to learn more about Computer Vision and Signal Processing from some of the world's renowned speakers. The space on this event is limited and discounted fee early bird registration deadline is 10 December, so please register early. Please follow these links:

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Controlling Nao the humanoid robot using Microsoft Kinect depth camera. The main purpose is to control humanoid robots (Aldebaran Nao in this case) in the most natural way possible, without wearing any kind of device, using arm and leg gestures.The second purpose is to make Human Robot interaction, and teaching new tasks to robots easier, without requiring and robotics knowledge by the user, which is a contribution to Learning from Demonstration field.

ICML 2011 invites the submission of engaging papers on substantial, original, and previously unpublished research in all aspects of machine learning. We welcome submissions of innovative work on systems that are self adaptive, systems that improve their own performance, or systems that apply logical, statistical, probabilistic or other formalisms to the analysis of data, to the learning of predictive models, to cognition, or to interaction with the environment. We welcome innovative applications, theoretical contributions, carefully evaluated empirical studies, and we particularly welcome work that combines all of these elements. We also encourage submissions that bridge the gap between machine learning and other fields of research.

[IMPORTANT DATES]

- Workshop and tutorial proposals: January 14, 2011.

- Paper submissions due: February 1, 2011.

- Author response period: March 25-30, 2011.

- Author notification: April 19, 2011.

- Workshop submissions due: April 29, 2011.

- Workshop author notification: May 20, 2011.

- Joint ICML-ACL-ISCA symposium: June 27, 2011.

- Tutorials: June 28, 2011.

- Main conference: June 29 - July 1.

- Workshops: July 2, 2011.

[FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE]

The conference will include three days of technical presentations, one day of tutorials and one day of workshops. In addition the conference will feature a symposium on "Machine Learning in Speech and Language Processing", organized jointly with with the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).

Papers accepted for ICML will each have an oral presentation as well as a poster in an evening poster session. Awards will be given for papers of outstanding quality. There will also be talks by several invited speakers, and a banquet.

[SUBMISSION]

Submission of papers and the management of the paper reviewing process will be entirely electronic. More instructions for authors can be found at http://www.icml-2011.org.

[REVIEWING PROCESS]

The review process incorporates some of the community feedback. Authors, reviewers, and area chairs indicate subject areas. With the help of these subject areas, area chairs bid for papers and one area chair is assigned to each paper. During a first round of reviewing, each paper will receive two reviews. First-round reviewers are assigned via subject areas and bidding.

Area chairs will then select additional reviewers manually based on the first-round reviews. Authors will then have the opportunity to see and respond to the reviews before a final decision is made. Final decisions will be made using the input from all reviewers, the author feedback, the area chair, and the program chairs. Reviewing for ICML 2011 will be blind to the identities of the authors.

ICML 2011 will not accept any paper that is substantially similar to another paper that is currently under review or has already been accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. Please clearly indicate in the submission which contributions are novel and which are previous work, either by the authors or others. If a paper submitted to ICML 2011 and another already published or already submitted paper contain substantial overlap in content and this overlap is not clearly indicated (anonymously) as being previous work, then the ICML submission may be rejected on the grounds of being a dual submission. Similarly, authors must withdraw their papers if they submit an overlapping paper elsewhere during ICML's review period. For papers published in substantially disjoint communities (application conferences, for example), the amount of novel content a paper needs to contain may be less, as long as the submitted papers are themselves clearly targeted to a machine-learning audience.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

The First ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), puts together the long-lasting experience of former ACM CIVR and ACM MIR. It is the ideal forum to present and encounter the most recent developments and applications in the area of multimedia content retrieval. Originally set up to illuminate the state-of-the-art in image and video retrieval, ICMR aims at becoming the world reference event in this exciting field of research, where researchers and practitioners can exchange knowledge and ideas.

ICMR 2011 is accepting proposals for technical demonstrators that will be showcased during the conference. The session will include demonstrations of latest innovations by research and engineering groups in industry, academia and government. ICMR 2011 is seeking original high quality submissions addressing innovative research in the broad field of multimedia retrieval. Demonstrations can be related to any of the topics defined by ICMR as shown in the call for papers. The technical demonstration showcase will run concurrently with regular ICMR sessions in the poster area.

Paper Submission

Papers must be formatted according to the ACM conference style. Papers must not exceed 2 pages in 9 point font and must be submitted as pdf files. While submitting the paper, please make sure that the names and affiliations of the authors are included in the document. Either the Microsoft Word or LaTeX format are accepted. The paper templates can be downloaded directly from the ACM website at http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates

All demo submissions will be peer-reviewed to ensure maximum quality and accepted demo papers will be included in the conference proceedings. The best demo will be awarded and announced during the Social Event.

We invite submissions for presentation at the CLEF2011 conference. We welcome submissions on all aspects of multilingual and multimodal information access evaluation and deployment. All submissions will be reviewed on the basis of relevance, originality, importance, and clarity.

Topics

Relevant topics for the CLEF2011 conference include but are not limited to:

Novel methodologies for the design of evaluation tasks, especially user-centric ones; Alternative methods for improving and automating ground-truth creation;Task-oriented and easy to communicate metrics;Innovative techniques for analysing experimental results, including statistical analyses, data mining, and information visualization;Infrastructures for bringing automation and collaboration in the evaluation process;Component-based evaluation approaches;Analysis of the impact of multilingual/multicultural/multimodal differences on interface and search design;Multilinguality and multimodality in relevant application communities – e.g. digital libraries, intellectual property, medical, music, and video domains – and social media.Testing and evaluation of translation and summaries over documents and of linked documents in multilingual information retrieval;Benefits of multilingual information retrieval methods for different user groups or in different use cases, including those relevant to the developing worldEconomic impact/sustainability of multilingual and multimodal information approaches, evaluation methodologies, and deployed systems.

LOCATION

Situated in the warm and sunny Mediterranean, Crete is the largest of the Greek islands. It is renowned in myth and rich in a history that spans thousands of years. The centre of the ancient Minoan civilisation, Crete is the backdrop to the dramatic legend of the Minotaur. Crete's history is intertwined with struggles for regional dominance; over centuries, Crete has been ruled by different peoples, including the Venetians, the Ottoman Turks, the Romans, and the Byzantines, all of whom of have left their mark on the island.Today, history and myth blend seamlessly with Crete's natural beauty and lively culture. Take in the sharp mountain ranges, interrupted by steep ravines and divided by fields of olive trees, all below a splendid sky. Spend a day exploring the wild cypress forests and keep an eye out for the kri-kri, the Cretan wild goat. A trip to the stunning White Mountains and the Samariá Gorge is a must, as are the many ruins and historic landmarks throughout the island. Unwind with a sunset stroll on the beach followed by a hearty meal at a local tavern, or an evening of vibrant city nightlife.

SIMPLE Descriptors

A set of local image descriptors specifically designed for image retrieval tasks.

Compact Composite Descriptors

A set of global image descriptors for image retrieval tasks.

MPEG-7 Descriptors

Download the latest Version of MPEG-7 Descriptors for C#. The implementation of these descriptors is based on Lire image retrieval System (Lire). Download the Descriptors

The LIRE (Lucene Image REtrieval) library provides a simple way to retrieve images and photos based on their color and texture characteristics. LIRE creates a Lucene index of image features for content based image retrieval (CBIR). Three of the available image features are taken from the MPEG-7 Standard: ScalableColor, ColorLayout and EdgeHistogram a fourth one, the Auto Color Correlogram has been implemented based on recent research results. Furthermore simple methods for searching the index and result browsing are provided by LIRE. The LIRE library and the LIRE Demo application as well as all the source are available under the Gnu GPL license.

Img(Rummager)

Img(Rummager) software can be connected with a database and execute a retrieval procedure, extracting the necessary for the comparison features in real time. The image-database can be stored either in the computer where the retrieval is actually taking place, or in a local network. Moreover, this software is capable of executing retrieval procedure among the keyword-based results that FlickR provides. Read More

Several image processing and retrieval examples using c#

Caliph & Emir
Caliph & Emir are MPEG-7 based Java prototypes for digital photo and image annotation and retrieval supporting graph like annotation for semantic metadata and content based image retrieval using MPEG-7 descriptors
Read More